Monday, February 18, 2008

SEO Articles is the place to come for free information about search engine optimization and the Internet marketing industry. At SEO Articles you can find everything from technical SEO minutia to broad-based marketing and advertising theory. SEO Articles is a non-commercial, informational site that strives to educate and illuminate all who come here.

SEO Articles provides our readership with the latest and greatest in industry-related thought and opinion. Since search engine optimization is not an exact science, there is much room for thought, discussion, observation, anecdotal evidence and opinion in this field.

Answers.com defines search engine optimization as "Designing a Web site so that search engines easily find the pages and index them. The goal is to have your page be in the top 10 results of a search. Optimization includes the choice of words used in the text paragraphs and the placement of those words on the page…" This may be very true, but SEO professionals know there is so very much more to this subject SEO Articles is just the place to talk about this.

In Google, for instance, inbound links are king, so simply optimizing what is on your webpage will not go far in Google. The good news, however, is that Yahoo and MSN do pay more attention to what is on the page and rank webpages more on the merits of on-page optimization that upon inbound links.

Search engine optimization has been a boom industry in recent years. The industry message boards reflect that the professionals have much to say in this industry. That is why we invite all SEO and Internet marketing experts to submit their articles to this site for possible publication.

At SEO Articles, we attempt to provide the most informative content from the industry's leading authorities and writers on the subject matter at hand. As is standard, we provide a link from our website to the author's site both as a courtesy and as a means to promote our authors to the reading public.

If you are a writer and would like to submit articles to the SEO articles website, please see our guidelines page for more details. Authors retain the copyright to all materials submitted but do grant the SEO Articles website non-exclusive rights to publish their works on our website. That's all we ask. It isn't too much, now is it?

Businesses that are active on the world wide web, no matter how great or small, are beginning to realize the necessity of search engine optimization. As with almost all things Internet related, however, their are a number of considerations to be made which can affect the level of success they achieve. One of the biggest areas of concern is how to go about finding the best solution for optimizing a web presence.

For small businesses and individuals, there are a number of free resources on the web that, with minimal consulting and a lot of time invested, can help produce effective results. SEO isn't rocket science after all, but one has to be marginally adept at understanding the principles behind it in order to properly optimize even the smallest and simplest of sites. SEO free resources, depending on the source, are generally good primers for the small business owner, though consulting should come into play after the initial optimization effort is underway. Free resources are free for a reason.

The reason is that they seldom offer the finite details necessary to rank well for competitive terms, which makes consulting services a bargain for the small business owner as they put the last pieces of the optimization puzzle into place. This is, at least in theory, how many small business owners achieve decent rankings for their site. The reality, though, is that few have the time to perform the work necessary to rank well. From keyword research, content, Meta tags and back link development to reporting and adjustment of multiple parameters, SEO is a time consuming endeavor. For this reason, most small business owners hire firms to perform their optimization as putting someone on the payroll full time isn't an expenditure that falls within their budget.

For mid-sized companies all the way up to large corporations, there are two options: hire someone in-house or contract with an SEO firm. Companies tend to lean toward hiring in-house SEO's for two main reasons. The first is the reduced cost of services and the second is that they gain the false sense of having better control over their optimization efforts. The first reason is valid, as many SEO firms are really SEM firms in disguise, and want to treat optimization as though it should be a perpetual, ongoing investment like PPC. They want to contract businesses for extended lengths of time with outlandish penalties for opting out early. They also tend to charge exorbitant monthly or bi-weekly fees that might lead some clients to guess if they are paying an expensive Manhattan or downtown L.A. mortgage. Not all SEO firms operate this way, however, and finding one to suit your needs and budget can be accomplished with a little searching.

As for companies having the false sense of better control over their optimization efforts, this is simply a holdout from the traditional business model that doesn’t stand up to the information age we live in. Hiring an SEO in-house because you feel that having him or her at arms length is an advantage is akin to setting up a kitchen in your office so that you can have more access to food preparation than ordering takeout can provide. The problems is that , like large scale food preparation, SEO requires a team effort. A souse chef is not a baker any more than an SEO guru is a content writer, developer, programmer, designer or submission specialist.

This is why competent firms will always be able to provide far better service than an in-house individual. Staying on top of changes to search engine algorithms, setting and adjusting Meta tags, designing search engine friendly navigation, writing well optimized content and building back links through multiple means is simply not possible for one individual working 9 to 5, or 24 hours a day for that matter.

If you’ve been anywhere in the SEM/SEO-sphere over the past month, you’veprobably heard of Danny Sullivan’s latest venture, the social news/communitysite “Sphinn.” It’s sort of a Digg clone, butspecifically for search marketing topics. Danny says it’s supposed to bepronounced “spi-hin” but to me it’s definitely “sfin” because otherwise it’stotally sphelled wrong!

When I first looked at Sphinn, I thought it was basically another SEO forumexcept that you can vote on the posts you think are good. I read some ofthe discussions but lost interest pretty quickly, as all I could think ofwas, “Wow…this is totally going to be a spammers’ heaven for link drops!”Basically, anyone can register and post a link to any article they want, andsince Sphinn is not using the nofollow link attribute it’s going to bepretty tempting to linkmongers!

When I received an email from Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land editor and astakeholder in Sphinn, telling all of us SEL columnists not to be shy aboutSphinning our own columns, I was a little taken aback. Promote our ownarticles? Really? Isn’t the first thing you learn in Online CommunityNetiquette 101 that self-promotional posting is one of the greatest gaffesyou can make? I remember being called out for that numerous times back atthe turn of the century when I’d drop a link in forums where it seemed tomake sense to do so. In our High Rankings Forum, we delete those types oflinks on the spot. We have very strict rules about linking, but policing itis very time-consuming.

Which brings me back to my original concerns about Sphinn. Danny and hisgang might be watching it very closely at the moment, but they have azillion other things on their plates. Are they going to be able to devotethe time and energy to separate the good links from the bad and remove themaccordingly? Danny’s online properties have tons and tons of traffic,making them huge targets for search engine spammers. Could Sphinn reallywork as intended and naturally bury the spammy link drops?

I decided the only way to find this out (other than waiting for it to playout on its own) was to register as a Sphinner and learn more about how itactually works. So one boring Saturday a few weeks ago, I conducted a test.My recent article from the last newsletter, “10 Blogger Types: The Good, theBad, and the Sleazy,” seemed like a goodenough one to start my Sphinning career, especially since catchy titles andtop-10 lists seem to be favored at most social media news sites.

Just 28 minutes after my post, I got a Sphinn! Whoo-hoo, I was on my way tofame and fortune! Thirty minutes after my post I read another post at Sphinnthat I liked, so I Sphunn it, which pushed it from 5 to 6 Sphinns. Afterthat I got tired of refreshing my screen every few minutes (Saturdays arenotoriously dead on search marketing sites, so I wasn’t expecting muchaction until Monday). I stepped away from my computer for a few hours (yeah,I actually do that now and then!).

When I checked again 3 hours after it wasoriginally posted, my article was up to 5 Sphinns — yeah baby! Upon closerinspection, I noted that Danny was one of my Sphinners and figured histhumbs-up might encourage others to Sphinn it as well.

6 hours - 8 Sphinns10 hours - 10 Sphinns

On Sunday morning when I first checked, it had 13 Sphinns, and after beingposted for a full 24 hours was up to 14. By then it had been promoted tothe “Hot Topics” category and was out of the “What’s New” section as well.

While watching and waiting, I had Sphunn a few more articles and it appearedthat some of the folks whose articles I had Sphunn had returned the favorand Sphunn mine. I was hoping they didn’t just do it as a reciprocal kindathing, but that they actually enjoyed the article itself. There had beensome previous articles at Sphinn about how it was a popularity contest with all sorts of politics involved, which I really am not into.

1 day and 2 hours - 16 Sphinns1 day and 7 hours - 18 Sphinns

At this point, I had noticed that Danny had removed certain articles thatdidn’t quite meet the Sphinn guidelines, which was very encouraging to me.Still, I continued to wonder if he’d always be there to do that and whetherthey might be planning on hiring a full-time babysitter for Sphinn.

Before bed on Sunday - 19 Sphinns

I have to say, I was quite pleased and pleasantly surprised at havingreceived so many Sphinns so quickly, especially during a slow weekend. Ifound myself getting caught up in the Sphinn-tasticness of it all. Eachtime I’d see a new Sphinn, I’d get all excited. No matter how old you get,receiving recognition for a job well done is something that we all crave.

Still, a more important test of Sphinn was whether it was driving anytraffic to the High Rankings website, so I fired up my other social mediaplayground, MyBlogLog, in which I have a nicesimple stats program set up. I found that on Saturday, I had 23 visitorsfrom Sphinn, and on Sunday, I had an additional 47. Not a ton, but again,not bad for a weekend. Eventually, I’ll check my Google Analytics toevaluate those visitors and to see if they took any additional action at thesite, like perhaps signing up for the newsletter.

Monday - 22 Sphinns but they seemed to be petering out.

As I write this 11 days after my 10 Blogger Types article was originallyposted, it has 27 Sphinns. Comparing it with other articles that had beenposted around the same time, I was satisfied with that number. It was clearthat people liked the article, and that was nice to know.

During the past week and a half, I have spent quite a lot of time at Sphinnand have done some additional research and Sphinning beyond just that firstarticle. What I noticed was quite interesting.

For instance, my recent SEL article, “Over-optimization Is Like Being aLittle Bit Pregnant,” was posted Thursday morning, and I was happy to see that someone had Sphunn it within a few hours, because I really didn’t want to do it myself, despite Chris Sherman’s encouragement to the contrary! I also thought it would be good to see if the results would be different for an article of mine that someone else had Sphunn. Would it receive more or less?

Well, apparently pregnancy isn’t sexy enough for the Sphinn audience, orperhaps my article just sucked, but as of today…6 days after it wasSphunn, that poor article got only 2 Sphinns (and 1 was mine!). I can’tmeasure the traffic to that one since it’s on the SEL site, so I’m not sureif people read it but didn’t Sphinn it or if they simply never bothered toclick through from Sphinn. The headline/title you use on your article orwhen you Sphinn it seems to be very important. I *thought* mine was prettycatchy, but maybe not. A lot of stuff there gets posted very quickly, andif people have only so much time to spend, they will browse through the newones and just click on the ones that sound interesting.

On a happier note, Pauline’s interview with Seth Godingot Sphunn quickly by someone and ended up with 16 Sphinns as of today. I also Sphunn a number of articles and blog posts that I had read last week as I caught up with my SEO RSS feeds, and many of them rose to the top of Sphinn very quickly. The most Sphinns were obtained by the blog post I submitted from fellow SEMNE members over at KoMarketing. They had a fun post listing 15 traits of SEO nerds, and it is currently up to 32 Sphinns!

All in all, I like Sphinn a lot more than I thought I would. I even thinkthat by its very democratic nature it could possibly be immune tolink-droppers, as the crappy stuff gets buried fairly quickly (as evidencedby my SEL article ;) . That said, as far as I know there aren’t currentlyany armies of Sphinners set up to scam it like there are with Digg. IfSphinn becomes very popular, you can bet those will crop up. I believe thatif Danny and the gang continue to police it vigilantly, it could be a coolplace to keep your finger on the pulse of the SEM/SEO world. Whether itbecomes a spammers’ heaven for link drops is yet to be seen!

Online business concerns follow internet marketing techniques and the best internet marketing tip is offered for free by many web sites which promote web designing and web promotion. Basically internet marketing revolves around five most important features. These basic features need to be addressed carefully before starting any web based internet business. Proper analysis of these features can be the best strategy for your business. The internet marketing tips are thus are eye openers for all those people who want to start online business on their own from scratch.

Objectives: for any business be it regular or online the objectives for starting a business should be clearly defined. These objectives should be very clear about why the business was started and for what benefits. For example if someone wants to start real estate business online then he should clearly focus on how, when and in what ways should he run the business and the expected returns and benefits. If you wish to start a web site then the objectives for starting the web site should be formulated much in advance. Well drafted business plans have higher success rates than businesses started without any focus. Thus well defined objectives are the most imperative step to be taken when you decide to start online business.

Target audience: now that the objectives are ready the target audience to whom you want to start the business should be clearly defined. Whom do you think will visit your business web site? Are they teenagers or business men or ladies or kids? Without selecting the target audience you can never start a business. If you run furnishing business then mostly women and elderly people might come for buying or repairing their furniture. If you start an online affiliate site to sell jewelry and ladies garments then you can expect ladies and teenagers. When you fix a target audience you can easily work through the business strategy keeping them in mind. You will know how to satisfy them and offer products that is suited for that particular audience.

Why should someone visit your site? What does he expect when he clicks on to your site? Defining this aspect and analyzing this fact can clarify many business and marketing needs. You stand in the shoes of a prospective customer who will click your site and then find out what you will expect. Learning customer behavior and behavioral patterns is a very effective tool and will reap long term benefits for the business overall.

Is your web site catering to customer satisfaction? Is the visitor of your site returning or logging out satisfied?

What can make the customer visit your site again or how can your site convert a first time visitor into a long term visitor?

Keeping all these tips in mind anyone can run a successful internet business.

The value "always" should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value "never" should be used to describe archived URLs.

priority -The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on your site.You may select between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your website and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your website.

Add as many pages as there are in your website.

Google Sitemap supports up to 50,000 pages per XML file.

Once you've completed all of those steps, you'll need to submit your site map page.

Submit to: (requires gmail account)

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

[If you don't have a gmail account send an email requesting a gmail account and I'll give them out until I run out of invites. (ts@seoforgoogle.com)]

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Social Media Optimization is the next level in marketing. When you combine Social Media Optimization with traditional SEO you have a scenario. You see, your product or service might not be presently known to the public and therefore it doesn’t matter if you rank for that phrase or not. Enter Social Media Optimization, the new approach to Word-Of-Mouth marketing. SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION allows you to efficiently spread the word and generate an intense amount of interest for a relatively unknown product or service.

Before your Social Media Optimization campaign gets into full swing an organized SEO campaign should be put into place to have the highest-ranking site for the terms that you will be promoting. Once you have ranked your site for all of your pertinent keywords you will be ready to receive all of the new searches.

When you mate the two concepts above together you have what we call in the world of Social Media Optimization, “A Slam-Dunk”.

Social Media Optimization is the be-all and end-all to Word-Of-Mouth marketing. Get in front of your peers and market sector with the innocence of a newfound friend. Then deliver the ultimate marketing punch before they see it coming. They’ll never know what hit them and why they ordered it!

Social Media Optimization goes on to other levels such as engineering videos to rank for specific terms and driving traffic to them. Can you think of a more measurable way to deploy your latest commercial than to put in places where you can literally count who has seen it? No more “mute” button fears. Your viewers are now of the engaged type. This is crucial for marketing budgets because we can measure user engagement.

This is a no-brainer. Gone are the days when you needed to estimate how many people saw the commercial. Gone are the days of pre-roll video on websites when again you had to estimate if they turned away while your ad ran. This is a completely different approach. Let us figure out the direction for your new program material based on actual data so that you can leverage a “new to you” but “previously existing” audience, which is ripe for the picking.

Social Media Optimization enables us to position your brand to your customers on their own terms and in their environment which results in a more authentic marketing message.

Again, old topic but thought I would elaborate anyway. Search engine marketing is in a period of hyper growth in the marketplace. According to a recent quote (can’t remember from whom) I heard at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, the growth of paid search rose 38% from 2005 to 2006; and in 2009 will become over a $10 billion industry. Keeping these statistics in mind, it is imperative for marketers to take paid search serious, include it in their marketing strategy and find ways to integrate search with other demand generation and/or direct marketing initiatives.

Some common examples include integrating search with any upcoming news releases. If your company is releasing a new product, service or initiative, it would be wise to ensure that you have a search campaign ready to go so when consumers read the news release and search for that particular term, you are ready for them. The same strategy can be used for any offline advertising as well.

Having access to future media plans are also helpful. This will give you adequate time to plan for a search campaign. For example, say your advertising team will be serving banner ads on Marthastewart.com. One idea would be to use Google’s Site Targeting feature and also serve contextual ads on Marthastewart.com during the same time frame.

Regardless of how you do it, integrating search is imperative. It’s not rocket science, nor is it anything new. I just found an article on ClickZ that was written well over a year and a half ago and some companies still can’t figure it out.

8. Participate: Get in there and get involved in the discussions going on among the blogs and sites of others, and do it organically. Earn your rep on Digg.com, don't try and force it.

9. Know how to target your audience: Understand your appeal and those people you wish to attract.

10. Create content: A little bit of rules 1 & 4 here, but the underlying message is know the form of content working for you.

11. Be real: Transparency pays off and no one likes a fake.

12. Don't forget your roots, be humble: Sometimes it can be easy to get carried away being a BlogStar or industry talking head. Remember those who helped you along the way, and that respect will help all involved.

13. Don't be afraid to try new things, stay fresh: Social Media is changing and morphing by the minute, keep up on new tools, products and challenges in your social sphere.

Squidoo An online platform and community that makes it easy for anyone to build a single page on a topic, idea, product or cause they are passionate about. These lenses in turn help finders get unique, human perspectives instead of computer-selected and often irrelevant search results.Digg Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you!Del.icio.us Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web. Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues. Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.YouTube On YouTube.com, people can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky and unusual. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.HubPages We've built a set of tools so easy to use that within minutes you'll be publishing your own articles and web pages, or as we call them, Hubs. And because one of our main goals is to share profits with our publishers, you'll be able to start making money almost immediately.BlueDot Blue Dot, Inc., is a Seattle-based company whose mission is to help people stay connected with their friends, wherever they are, whenever they want. Through a new type of communication described as Social Discovery®, Blue Dot's free Web site allows users to find, save and share interesting Web content with friends and family.Friendster With more than 30 million members, Friendster is the best way to stay in touch with your friends and it's the fastest way to discover the people and things that matter to you most. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Friendster aims to make the world a smaller place by bringing the power of social networking to every aspect of life, one friend at a time.

There is an exceptionally interesting meme developing around the idea of social media optimization. It started with Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations and his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) and this insight:

“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

With contributions by Jeremiah Owyang, “Rules of Social Media Optimization and Cameron Olthuis, “Introduction to Social Media Optimization” who offers this take on SMO:

“SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren’t the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it’s not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.”

The ever insightful Loren Baker also gets in on the action and offers up, “Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO” and his additions: “Don���t forget your roots, be humble and don���t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh”.

What I would like to see added is:

14. Develop a SMO strategy - define your objectives and set goals. Be fully aware of what your desired outcome is as a result of performing these tactics. Reputation, sales, influence, credibility, charity, traffic/page views, etc.

15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely. Be cognizant of what actions will influence the desired outcome with the most impact.

According to Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum during the SES San Jose session “Marketing with Social Media“, 1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it. That’s a lot of influence wielded by content creators and those that reblog and mashup. Think about what you can do to enable content creation as well as the repurposing of that content for what might possibly be the most productive outcome.

16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices. As with good SEO, SMO tactics should become part of your organization’s best practices. Find ways to incorporate SMO tactics at the “template” level of document creation and as part of information distribution. Minor things like encouraging social bookmarks and rewarding incoming links as a standard practice across the organization can go a long way.

Regardless of the media, there is almost always going to be an “organic” and an “advertising” component. Think: SEO and PPC. Consider this session from the recent ad:tech conference in Chicago called “Advertising with Social Media“. It presented some interesting opportunities and challenges for advertisers regarding MySpace, YouTube and other social/consumer generated media. Advertisers recognize the reach of social media, but aren’t quite sure how to take advantage of it.

For reference, here is an aggregated list so far. Maybe we need a wiki for this?

Danny's hoping that I'll post something on social media optimization marketing and it's hard to let a soon-to-be-unemployed man down (too soon?). Thus, I give you my version of an introduction to the social media space - what's important, what's worth your time and how to go about working the SMO SMM angle.

What Can You do with SMO SMM?

* Create pages that provide links back to your site (for both traffic and link popularity) * Create pages that will rank well in the search engines for low-moderately competitive terms/phrases * Build profiles on sites that can attract links, attention and contacts from other members * Contribute to the growth and value of social media sites

What are the Best Strategies?

To my mind, you first need to outline your goals - oftentimes, many of the purposes above will overlap, but you should still focus clearly on what you want to achieve. For many folks, SMM is about pushing a negative link out of the top 10-20 results at the search engines. For others, it's about getting free, low-hassle backlinks. For many of our clients, visibility itself is the achievement - getting recognized as a company/person who's consistently participating in the social media world has great benefits. Since the first two goals are fairly obvious, I'll put a little effort into explaining the visibility argument.

When you have a profile that people recognize on sites like Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia or in a set of industry blogs, you have a significant ability to influence discussion, create content and push visibility for links. My post on Digg's top users could easily describe Newsvine or Wikipedia. Once you've built up a profile that people recognize as a valuable source for information, you become more powerful in that community. Your bookmarks/articles/submissions/etc take on a greater value than the anonymous contributions of newbies. This mirrors the social structure of many web forums - big voices carry greater weight.

The ultimate goal of this visibility is to have the power to influence - once you have a voice, marketing becomes a soft-sell, rather than a hard one. Your SMM strategy may be to build links, rank a page in the engines or simply to generate leads, and all can be better accomplished with a prominent profile.

Assuming you have your goals defined, you'll need to know where to go to start profile-building, content creating and spamming on the square.

Where to Go SMMing?

The best sites for SMMing (Social Media Marketing) are those that have achieved popularity enough to attract visitors, links and search engine rankings. I'll give a rundown of the ones I believe are valuable to participate in. I've ordered these from most valuable to participate in to least valuable (although there are hundreds below the 25 I've listed and probably some that belong on here that I've forgotten).

Each of these sites have different foci, unique benefits and demand attention to detail and a sub-strategy that considers the quirks and peculiarities of the userbase. For example, making it to the top of Reddit with a politically focused article is far easier than doing so at Digg (or Del.icio.us/popular). Experience is the best way to learn, so start browsing and playing. The only rule I'd apply to SMMing is to look before you leap. Don't just start spamming or submitting content to these sites without getting a good grasp on what's getting popular and receiving attention on them. There's nothing worse than getting banned from a small-time social media site because you spammed 'em, only to find out that site is the next Slashdot.

Good luck to all you SMMers out there. A year from now, the list and the tactics will surely be far different from what they are now.

While most sports fans last week were getting ready for SuperBowl Sunday, one of the defying moments was taking place in this years presidential campaign. And it took place online, at Dipdive.com with The Yes We Can Song.

As I am writing this on Sunday afternoon east coast time, the YWC video has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube in just over a week and has garnered over 20,000 comments. Within the next week it will probably become the most viewed political video of all-time on YouTube. And these figures don’t count the number of people who’ve heard the song on Dipdive.com.

The video was created by the Black-Eyed Peas’ will.i.am and involved the participation of 30-odd famous musicians and actors like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Tatyana Ali, Nick Cannon, Common, Kelly Hu, Scarlett Johansson, John Legend, Nicole Scherzinger and Kate Walsh.

CNN said about the video:

With just a few days to go before the critical Super Tuesday primaries, Black Eyed Peas’ frontman will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan, son of legendary musician Bob Dylan, have released a new song featuring a host of celebrities and one very unlikely music video star: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. “Yes We Can,” released Friday, is centered around footage of the speech the Illinois senator gave after the New Hampshire primary last month. The music video includes excerpts from that Obama speech and appearances from celebrities including jazz artist Herbie Hancock, former LA Lakers captain Kareem Abdul Jabbar, singer John Legend, model Amber Valletta, actresses Kate Walsh and Scarlett Johansson, and others.

The video stands out from other user-generated content in that is looks and sounds professional. But that does not take way from the power of the video and the impact that it is having. The viral nature of social media means that 3 million plus people have watched a 4 ½ minute speech by Barack, and it did not cost his campaign anything.

Purchasing four and a half minutes of national TV airtime would have been near impossible. But through social media marketing the Obama campaign is able to reach its out to its young enthusiastic demographic base, further demonstrating that he is the candidate of change.

I have always thought that the Internet would play an important role in this years election, and this video shows how the Obama camp and his supporters understand the power of social media much better than any other candidate.

I had an interesting conversation with a new client yesterday. The conversation was around goals and what we wanted to achieve during our campaign. As the conversation progressed I was struck by how social media is changing how we market online.

If I think back to how this conversation would have gone two years ago I am sure we would have been focused on discussing keywords and how to get onto the first page of Google for them. The complete strategy would have been focused around the web site.

One year ago the conversation would have moved from rankings for keywords to driving targeted traffic to the web site. While everything is still focused on the web site as the primary destination, focusing on traffic was a natural progression from just focusing on rankings, because it doesn’t matter if you ran for something that doesn’t bring visitors to your web site.

Yesterday’s conversation was about making this brand the destination of choice online, regardless of where people are searching, for their targeted keywords. Yes we want to rank highly on the search engines for the main keywords. But we also want to appear when those searches take place on Facebook, Delicious and YouTube. In addition we want to be involved in the conversations that Bloggers are having within our target niche.

Suddenly the web site is no longer the primary destination. We are willing to go out and interact with people regardless of where they are searching online, regardless of where that conversation is taking place.

This is a huge shift in mindset, both from a marketing perspective as well as a marketer perspective. But the companies that understand that social media can help them grow market share, are the ones that are positioned to take advantage of this shift.

For the marketers (and marketing companies) who are still focused on search engine ranking reports, that sound you hear is your market share disappearing.

E-consultancy had an interesting post about Forrester Research who are advising clients that a recession is the time to be advertising on social networks. As Forrester put it:

Social applications in particular, such as communities and social networking sites, are cost-effective and have a measurable impact on prospects’ decisions in the consideration stage, which will be important to companies under recessionary pressures.

This is an interesting position for Forrester to take as social networks have not exactly been a boon for most advertisers. In their paper Forrester makes two points why this is a good time to switch your advertising dollars to social networks. The first point is:

“Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.”

Yes a successful viral campaign can be much more effective than a traditional campaign (see the Barack video for an example of this). But isn’t viral marketing simply successful word-of-mouth marketing? You can plan on having a campaign go viral, but unless the message resonates with the consumer (and that is a big if), your message will go nowhere. Social networks can be a conduit to helping your message go viral, but it needs a good message and product in order to be successful.

The second point is:

“They’re cheap. Advertising campaigns often run into millions of dollars. But Facebook pages and blogs are two examples of social programs that you can start for next to nothing. Even more sophisticated programs like a full-blown customer community typically don’t cost more than $50,000 to $300,000 to get going.”

Just because it is inexpensive to advertise on social networks does not mean that the traffic you are buying is good. There is a reason why StumbleUpon lets you buy traffic at $.05 a click in even the most competitive markets. Social networks are notorious for providing advertisers with lots of ad impressions, very few clicks and even less conversions. One of the reasons for this is that users of social networks are not on social with a commercial intent. When I talk to my nieces who are heavy Facebook users, they all mention that they are never looking to buy something when they are on Facebook. They are there to socialize. They are blind to the ads.

It is akin to when you use Gmail. How many of you actually read the ads that go along with the email you are reading? You ignore the ads, because you are not looking to buy something. The same applies to broad based social advertising campaigns.

The only difference between a poorly executed cheap social marketing campaign and a poorly executed expensive marketing campaign is the amount of money that you spend.

About six weeks ago we began to develop and implement a social media marketing plan for a soccer web site. Soccer Tickets Online is a new site and the initial focus of our social media marketing efforts has been to build brand awareness.

As I mentioned, Soccer Tickets Online is a new web site so the first goal of the campaign was to make people aware that the site exists. There are many different ways to approach that sort of goal, but the one we took was link baiting. We developed a page called “The best 5 soccer players of all-time” and submitted it to Digg. The post made the front page of Digg and crashed the server. Not a bad start

Like any social media campaign there were a couple of key learning’s. One was that we saw that we only needed 95 Diggs for the post to go popular instead of the hundreds that posts in other categories need. The reason for this is that soccer is not as competitive as other categories.

We also saw that while the post got only 95 Diggs, Digg drove 2,213 visitors to the web site. This verified something that we had previously thought which was that Digg takes into consideration the amount of times someone clicks on a title in addition to how many votes a post gets in deciding whether to make that post popular.

This piece of information shows the importance of writing a Digg Headline that encourages people to click through to the web site. The headline we used “Top 5 Soccer Players of all-time” is something that “baits” people to click on through and see who the five players were.

Due to the success of the top soccer players post, we followed it up a week two weeks later with a similar “link bait” post titled “The Best Young Soccer Players in The World”. Note the only reason we waited two weeks, was because of the holidays!

With our second piece of link bait, we wanted to see how this type of post would work on other social networks, and we wanted to spread the submissions over several days to see if that would increase the buzz and traffic.

The three social networking sites we submitted the post too were StumbleUpon, Digg and Netscape. On Digg the post went popular again while the StumbleUpon numbers were very strong. All told this post had 3,400 page views and the web site got 1,333 visits from StumbleUpon and 788 from Digg.

Unfortunately the Digg post got buried as some Diggers though that the URL soccerticketsonline.com was too commercial. This is a problem that is happening more and more on Digg and is something that we need to take into consideration when we do addition posts on Digg.

Six weeks into this social media campaign we have created five targeted social media events focused around creating awareness for the web site. We have been lucky in that 2 of the events went popular on Digg and 2 made the buzz page at StumbleUpon.

Last month StumbleUpon and Digg sent over 5,000 visitors to the web site. If the two posts had not been buried on Digg, the traffic numbers would have been a lot higher.

In addition to creating awareness about the site, one the other goals from this phase of the campaign was to use social media to get this web site out of any search engine sandbox. With 270 referrals from the search engines we are on our way to succeeding with this goal.

Now that we have build awareness of the site, our next step will be to focus on developing relationships with the soccer community, especially those sites that focus on MLS teams. Phase one was like an all out advertising blitz where phase two is much more tactical in its approach.

I will keep you updated in 30 days about how phase two of our social media marketing plain proceeding.

Glen Allsopp of ViperChill wrote an interesting piece on Search Engine Land titled 15 Fundamental Truths About Social Media Marketing. I am not going to repeat all 15 of Glen’s truths, but I did want to highlight a couple of the points her brought up.

You must get involved in the top social media sites to understand them thoroughly: My thought process behind this was that the only way to start understanding the type of content that works is by being exposed to the stories, titles and content on a daily basis.

You can talk about social media marketing and reputation management all day, but until you actually go and use the major social media sites on a regular basis, all that talk is nothing but theory. You have to participate and try different things to really understand how each site works. StumbleUpon is very different than Digg and you cannot know what the differences are unless you participate in these sites.

Not everything you try will work: I’ve spent hours on a content piece that had all the hallmarks of popular social media content. It was a list post, was relevant to current events and had a catchy title. Nonetheless, it didn’t make the Digg homepage, received minimal votes on StumbleUpon and no bloggers really picked it up. Just because the content is good it doesn’t guarantee success.

This is such a great piece of advice. I have been really surprised over the last year at what succeeds and what doesn’t. I have had Digg and StumbleUpon submissions that I was thought get little traction, and then I have seen some other posts make the home page of Digg and crash my server.

Social media is about trying different things and seeing what works and then conducting an analysis to see what worked and what didn’t. Overtime you develop a play book of the type of content that works on each social media site. But the only way that you can put together the play book is by trying different things and having the analytics in place to measure there success.

So often people equate Digg with social media marketing. Yes Digg is an important site, but it a site that is dominated with males under the age of 24. That is a great demographic if you want to reacj Mac users, but if your audience is Female and slightly older, then you will be much more successful on Sk*rt than Digg. So just because an idea does not work on Digg does not mean it is a bad idea. It might mean that you are not appealing to the right audience.

You must be a real user:When getting staff to start using these sites I encouraged them to forget about the client side of things. I simply asked that they vote for what they found interesting whether it be fashion, cars or music and then add content submitters as friends if they wanted to read articles on the same subjects. Engage in communities: Whether this be on social networks, forums, blogs or social news sites it’s important to really embrace and engage with communities.

I combine these two points because I think there is a lot of similarity between the two. One common mistake I see people do who are interested in social media is that they create a Digg or StumbleUpon account, submit their site and then wonder why they did not get lots of traffic. Social media is, as the name says, social. In order to succeed you need to participate and engage in the communities.

If you are interested in getting StumbleUpon traffic for example, I would recommend spending the next 3-4 months building up your account. As Glen says, vote on topics that interest you, add friends and become part of the community. Once you have done that, then you can start mixing in some of your own sites with your other submissions.

Social media marketing is only one strategy:Although it can bring great results, it shouldn’t be totally relied on and certainly should not replace any existing SEO or PPC campaigns.

I agree so much with this point. I believe that social media should be a component of your online marketing strategy. It does not replace SEO or PPC. It works with these other marketing tactics. In our case studies we have found that social media marketing can have a tremendous impact on your organic search results.

It was July 19th, 2005 when Robert Murdoch surprised Wall Street when he spent $580m to purchase MySpace, So how does the investment look 2 1/2 years later?When Murdoch bought MySpace it was predominately a US social network. Today it is a worldwide force with 24 local versions. Besides introducing new musicians and playing host to amateur filmmakers, MySpace is also signing artists to its own record label and developing online video series. Earlier this month it introduced a content guide called MySpace Celebrity.

All these changes have worked out well for MySpace. With an estimated 110 million monthly active users, and more than 1.3 billion page views a day, MySpace has become a favorite of advertisers.

Richard Greenfield, a media analyst for Pali Research was interviewed by the New York Times recently and he said expected MySpace to have around $800 million in revenue in fiscal 2008, mostly through advertising. That $580 million purchase price looks pretty cheap now.

Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder and chief executive of MySpace is working on changing the image of MySpace.

“Some people still perceive MySpace like it was in early 2004, as a niche place for scenesters in New York and Los Angeles. That’s how it started, but it’s become very mainstream,” Mr. DeWolfe, 41, said. “It’s about consuming content and discovering pop culture.”

As part of its makeover, MySpace is starting to resemble more and more a traditional media platform like Yahoo or AOL than a traditional social networking site. Peter F. Chernin, the president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, called MySpace a “contemporary media platform” and said the site existed to “create content and connect people to one another.”

There is no doubt that the purchase of MySpace by Robert Murdoch was a smart business deal. The site dominates the social networking space in terms of visitors, page views and advertising revenue.

What will be interesting to watch in the coming twelve months is how MySpace develops as a media platform. MySpace has the potential to match the growing media platform that is Google. At the moment Google and MySpace are business partners, but I expect that relationship to be challenged as MySpace continues to grow.

Remember that since the MySpace acquisition Murdoch has purchased the Wall Street Journal. An advertising platform that covers Music, Celebrities, TV and Finance could be a Google killer.

Cameron Olthuis at Pronet Advertising has a nice write up on optimizing for social media, dubbed Social Media Optimization (SMO) by Rohit Bhargava.

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

There has been some cross blogging back and forth between Rohit, Cameron, and Jeremiah Owyang on the rules of Social Media Optimization, and I’ll add a couple more.

8. Participate : Get in there and get involved in the discussions going on among the blogs and sites of others, and do it organically. Earn your rep on Digg.com, don’t try and force it.

9. Know how to target your audience : Understand your appeal and those people you wish to attract.

10. Create content : A little bit of rules 1 & 4 here, but the underlying message is know the form of content working for you.

11. Be real : Transparency pays off and no one likes a fake.

And mine:

12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble : Sometimes it can be easy to get carried away being a BlogStar or industry talking head. Remember those who helped you along the way, and that respect will help all involved.

13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh : Social Media is changing and morphing by the minute, keep up on new tools, products and challenges in your social sphere.

One of the coolest things about the rise of social networking and sharing sites like MySpace and YouTube are the new opportunities they offer to marketers, even to search marketers. Into that space seems to have come a new term, SMO -- social media optimization.

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) from Rohit Bhargava to my understanding is the first use of this new term. In it, Rohit expresses how SMO and SEO can work together:

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

In other words, many who do search engine optimization have learned to build search engine friendly sites. Do that, and the search engines often will naturally reward you with traffic. But is your site social media friendly? Have you added the things that will get you into the new fertile ground of SMO?

It's worth considering. Conceptually, some of this stuff isn't new. For example, we long had people taking about ways to help others bookmark your web site. But today's new wave of social media sites can operate as a magnifying glass. Get that one person to bookmark you to del.icio.us and in turn you might tap into many other links. And those links, of course, flow back into helping with search rankings.

Rohit's got tips in his post above. If those aren't enough, check out Cameron Olthuis's Introduction to Social Media Optimization, which provides further tips. Loren Baker then goes on with further ones in Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO, recapping those from Cameron and Rohit and adding his own. For yet more, Lee Odden offers some up on New Rules for Social Media Optimization. Need still more? You can't go wrong keeping up with post from SEOmoz. Rand Fishkin's never happier than when he's offering some SMO advice. And someday I'm going to sit Dax Herrera down and debrief him on the many sharing sites that I've him frequent with the ease of a native. The sale of his mustache, while not technically on a sharing site, was still a classic of working another site (eBay) to drive traffic to your own.

For me, that's one of the biggest adjustments coming from the SEO world and into SMO, understanding that your presence can be in multiple places without being harmful.

Here's what I mean. Generally in SEO, it's good advice to have one single web site that you point to. Build traffic to a common domain, rather than divide it among various places. Sure, as you mature in SEO, you learn the advantages to having multiple sites. A corporate blog and a corporate web site can equate to double the representation in top search results. But there are limits, and you're still basically driving traffic to places you own.

With SMO, the adjustment is understanding that you have multiple places that while you don't own them still can be valuable to you. A Flickr profile can get you traffic in the Flickr space. Similarly, your del.icio.us bookmarks while on the del.icio.us site still might drive traffic. And have you gotten a MySpace profile yet? Go now, because you might decide you want it to drive traffic from MySpacers down the line.

Matt Cutts didn't -- and now someone else owns his valuable Matt Cutts persona over there. Meanwhile, I might never flow into MySpace the way my 16 year old niece does. But should I decide to do more there, I'm sure I'll wish that I hadn't let this Danny Sullivan get the name I wish I'd had. Still, at least I've staked my claim -- and Tom's even my friend. Except Tom's NOT my friend, of course.

Want to discuss more? We've got two good threads going in the Search Engine Watch Forums, Here Come's Social Media Optimization? and What Is Social Search?

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a new term that was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava and has since been taking on life of its own. In his introduction to SMO, Rohit draws similar comparisons to SEO. SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren't the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it's not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.

First of all "social media" is a buzzword that has been thrown around a lot lately. But what exactly does it really mean? Wikipedia describes social media as...

the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.

Also, social media can be considered anything that can help build a community to rally around. Companies/websites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, and Revver all fit the bill. These are all websites that can now be used as places to put out your marketing message. Spreading messages through blog posts and blog search engines also fits the bill. It is all about making something easy to spread, which, by the way, used to be called word-of-mouth. Buyer beware though, you can't force SMO. This is pull marketing; it is not "push your message onto someone marketing".

With SEO the goals are clearly defined, you're trying to make a website visible in the search engines. Is SMO really as simple to define as making your site visible in the social media? Does that entail anyway possible and include buying banner ads on MySpace?

Rohit defines the goals as...

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Deeho Search Engine Optimization (optimisation)(seo) solutions are committed to creating functional business enhancing Web sites that not only deliver your message but also achieve high visibility on the World Wide Webs leading search engines.

So many times Web Site Design is used by designers to create clever and stunning visual sites only for no one to see them because they are invisible to search engines. Google runs one of the worlds largest popularity contests that rewards good Web Site Design & punishes mistakes severely.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engines score Web Site Design on a vast range of criteria, which are constantly assessed to ensure that the most suitable sites appear in your search results.

Although Google tries to think like a human being, it is still only a computer & so relies upon a complex algorithm to compile the necessary data.This algorithm rely's upon looking for over one hundred different factors on each page which it then scores in order to be able to rank each site. These factors can also be over done so it is very important to seek professional guidance before attempting to optimize a site yourself.Search engine Optimization,search engine marketing, seo graph 1

Google uses electronic "spiders" to search for links on web sites, & then follows them reading all the text it can find on the way. It likes to find keywords in groups, headings, image labels etc, but not too many otherwise it will think that you are trying too hard & will then begin to count them against you.

Google has a huge problem with reading images & Java Script (flash buttons/links etc). The problem is it can't read them or follow them. This means that whilst you may have the richest content on the web for you given topic, if your navigation devices are images or Java Script then all google will see is a blank page with no links & you will forever wallow at number 1,458,000 in the rankings.Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo graph 2

Search Engine Optimization (seo)

Deeho Search Engine Marketing (SEM) use tried & tested processes to make your web site Google friendly. We will Optimize every page of your site & in addition customize your web site from a Search Engine Optimization view point for your industry, adding pages that will significantly increase the quantity & quality of traffic flow into your site.

Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo image 7

All the major search engines use two types of scoring to evaluate web site Design, on page & off page. On page is as I have said above just a matter of making sure that your pages are in a format that Google likes to see & values highly. Off page Web Site Design is the second method of valuation for your site, namely "Is your site good enough so that other sites link to it?" Google looks at each & everyone of those links & the "Page Rank" of the site that the link is on & forms an opinion on that basis as to how popular your site is likely to be. If you for example have a link from a High Street Banks site that has a PR of 7/10 it will be worth far more than 100 links from your friends blog pages PR0/10.Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:

This free page rank checking tool is powered by Page Rank Checker service

There are so many factors to consider when getting involved in the Search Engine Optimization (optimisation)(seo) process that it can be too easy to miss a step along the way. We have the experience & Knowledge to drive your web site to the top of the rankings.

This is not an overnight process however, from first contact to a top ten ranking can take up to a year as building a positive image for your site is a cumulative ongoing process that cannot be rushed.You should treat anyone who claims quick results with caution as it is not possible within the strict parameters set by Google. Only by combining all of the above mentioned factors can you build your Page Rank within Google & thus feature well.

Social Media Optimization is advance viral marketing where we are using our social network for marketing; in other words; we are using Online Social Media for Marketing.Following are the methods of social media optimizations:

1. Online Web Directories Submission: Online web directories submission is a good promotional method, it is an old technique. In current situations SEOs are using web directories for getting one way back links and we can not expect good no of traffic from web directories

2. Article Syndication: Article Syndication is a very good way to redirect internet traffic on website even from article syndication; a website getting good no of back links. Sometimes article are getting good rank on major search engines on some popular keyphases, on that scenario, article becomes a very good way of getting web traffic.

3. Press Release Syndication: Advantages of Press Releases Syndication is similar with Article submission. Through Press Release Syndication we promote any events or news. Sometimes it become very popular among intenet users for getting new informations about new events and updated news.

4. Online Classifieds and Yellow pages Ads: Online classified and yellow pages ads can be a good way of getting good no of online traffic. Online classified ads like www.craigslist.org and www.olx.com is very good way of getting good traffic. Yellow pages ads are good way of promoting business services on internet, website like www.Yellowpages.com etc. redirecting good number of online traffic.

5. Book Marking (Digg, Furl etc.): Digg, Furl etc. bookmarking website offers to store WebPages link and information on internet and share bookmark links with friends. Social bookmark website helps to improve backlinks as well as online traffic. Search Engines like Google gives advantages on this kind of backlinks. These website allows to share bookmark WebPages with the network so no doubt it can be a very good idea of online promotion.

6. Blog Syndication: Blog promotion is an old strategy of website promotion, time to time search engines update their algorithm and value of blog links reduced but if we can think about advanced internet marketing aspects, blog content syndication is a good way of promotion. We just need to syndicate blogs content on internet. Through this method we can also reduce the chances of content duplicacy problem on website.

7. RSS Feed Syndication: RSS Feeds syndication is a great way of improving internet traffic on website, through RSS feed; we can syndicate Audio files, Vidio Files, and text content on internet. YouTube.com can be a great source of improving internet traffic through syndicated media files.

8. News Groups and Forum Promotion: News Groups like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, and forums like WebMasterWorld and Digitalpoint is very good ways of increasing traffic on website.

9. Online Community Promotion: online community websites like Orkut, Hi5, Linkedin getting huge number of traffic every day and if we optimized these areas for website promotion, we can increase the good number of visitors on website.

10. News Letters and E-mail Promotion: for increasing visitors on website email and newsletter promotion is very good way, peoples are considering it as a spam technique but if we work on optimized Newsletter and Email promotion it will be very good for increasing good number of visitors on website.

Social Media Optimization is very good Technique of website promotion. The mail aim of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to increase no of relevent visitors on website through Search Engine. In Social Media Optimization, we can increse traffic on website even no need to target some high competitive keywords on search engine and website start getting results from first day.

If you set yourself up properly, when users click through an ad for your product or company on another site, they end up on a landing page. This is your sales pitch to convince them to convert. You’ll find plenty of tips for building, testing, and improving your landing pages, but it all boils down to one word: focus.

Time and again I encountered this point in my research. Lisa Barone made the point in a blog for Bruce Clay. She was covering a MarketingSherpa seminar about its updated book on landing pages. The sentence that leaped out at me was “What makes a landing page effective is its focus around a single topic.” She wrote that in the context of fine-tuning the eye flow for a landing page, but it’s really what brings a landing page together: everything on the page focuses on one topic, with one goal: convincing your visitors to convert.

Hard selling belongs on your landing page, but it’s a special kind of hard sell. You must take your visitors by the hand and guide them to what you want them to do. Matthew Roche shared some insight as to the necessity for this in a February 2007 post in his blog. In the days before the web, consumers simply read and/or watched ads, which marketers could at least imagine led smoothly and directly to a sale. But it’s quite rare for a person to “go online, type a URL into a browser, visit that single site, accomplish a task, and leave the web completely,” Roche notes. “More often, we search, we dither, we explore, we lose track, we gain focus, we complete an action, we get bored, we get called for dinner, we log off.”

This is what you’re up against when you create your landing page. Your landing page needs to grab your visitors’ attention, hold onto that attention while giving them what they want and expect, and persuade them to do what you want them to do: buy the product, sign up for the newsletter, what have you. In marketing, this is sometimes referred to as the three Cs: capture their attention, communicate the value of your offering, and close the deal. In this article I’ll go over each of these points and what you can do to make sure your landing pages successfully carry them through.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

At my day job, we’re contacted every now and then by clients asking about search engine positioning and optimisation. Most of the time the client has been approached by an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) consultant trying to talk them into paying lots of money for search engine optimisation. The SEO firms promise “guaranteed top results” and “submission to 500 000 search engines and directories”.

Many site owners are regularly contacted by scam companies of this kind, and it’s understandable that many take the bait and start paying for “top results and submission to everything”. After all, who doesn’t want their site to be highly ranked by search engines?

In an attempt to help a few people avoid paying for unnecessary search engine optimisation, I’d like to share what I have done to achieve very good search engine rankings, for this site as well as for clients’ sites.

First, just let me say that not all SEO consultants out there are scam artists – there are many reputable firms in the business. However, anyone promising “guaranteed top results”, “submission to 500 000 search engines and directories”, “instant results”, or “permanent top positions” is most likely a scammer. There is no way anyone can guarantee that your site is the number one result unless they actually control the search engine results, or if the top ranking is for a word or phrase that only exists on your site, of course.

What strikes me as I think through the steps I have taken to get good search engine rankings is how much SEO has in common with accessibility, usability, and high quality markup – the principles of web standards. That actually makes it even better: by making your site more accessible and usable for humans, and by using valid, semantic markup, you also make it more attractive to search engine robots.

Consider the guidelines I describe here a basic level of SEO – try this first, and if you’re still not getting the results you want, you may want to look into getting help from a reputable search engine optimisation firm. If you contact someone regarding optimising your site, ask them what they will do for your site. If they suggest any kinds of shady methods, be very careful. They might get you penalised or even banned from search engine indexes. On the other hand, if their advice includes what I’m suggesting here, they will probably do a good job.

There are no shortcuts

I’ll start with the bad news if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get great results. There isn’t one. Instead, expect to do some hard work, especially when it comes to the content of your site.

You will also need patience. Results do not come overnight. If you’re working on improving the search engine positioning of a client’s site, you should probably explain this to them early on.Write good content

This is probably the single most important thing you need to do if you want to be found on the web. Even if your site is technically perfect for search engine robots, it won’t do you any good unless you also fill it with good content. Yes, really!

Good content to me is text that is factually and grammatically correct, though that is not necessarily a must for all kinds of sites. Whatever your site is about, the content needs to be unique and/or specific enough to appeal to people. More specifically, it needs to be useful to the people you want to find your site.

Good content brings return visitors. Return visitors who like your content will eventually link to your site, and having lots of inbound links is great for search engine rankings, especially if those links are from highly ranked sites.

Closely related to good content is fresh content. By adding new content regularly, you give visitors a reason to come back. Search engine robots will also visit your site more often once they notice that you update regularly, which means that any new content you add will be indexed quicker.

When doing work for clients, creating quality content is rarely the responsibility of the web designer. Often, the client wants to write their own copy, which is fine if they’re good at it and keep adding new content. In my experience, that is rarely the case. If at all possible, try to make the client realise that they should hire someone to help them write, or at least get someone to help them edit what they have written. In either case, make it clear to them that they can’t expect consistent high rankings without good content.

Think about spelling

If you write in English, you are probably aware of the differences in spelling between American and British English. Colour vs. color, optimisation vs. optimization, etc. There are also many words that are commonly misspelled (this goes for all languages).

I don’t like the idea of intentionally misspelling words, since it goes against my definition of “good content”. If words with multiple spellings or commonly misspelled words are an important part of your content, i.e. keywords, consider adding a glossary or similar to include the most common spelling variations on the page.

Write descriptive page titles

By making your page titles simple, yet descriptive and relevant, you make it easier for search engines to know what each page is about, and people scanning through search results can quickly determine whether your document contains what they are looking for. The page title is also what is used to link to your site from search result listings.

Because of this, the title element is one of the most important elements on a page. Some argue that it is the most important element.

The same question comes up time and time again - "Is this spam?". What the question really means is, "Is this wrong or unethical?", although sometimes the question may mean, "Is this going to get my site penalized?".

The fact is that none of the so-called spam techniques and methods are in any way wrong or unethical. A technique or method only becomes wrong or unethical when it is used unethically; e.g. a page that appears to be about one thing but which automatically redirects people to something quite different.

An example of a search engine optimization method that some consider to be spam/wrong/unethical is hidden text. The idea behind hidden text is to show some optimized text to the search engines but not to people viewing the page in a browser. It is done because the text wouldn't make much sense to the viewer or it would spoil the design of the page. But there is nothing wrong with this technique. It doesn't attempt to hide anything from the search engines. The fact that they don't want it is irrelevant. The text is in plain sight to them and their programs. If they don't spot it, that's their problem.

What should be realized about all the so-called search engine spam techniques is that they don't hurt anyone. In fact they help everybody. Unless they are used unscrupulously, they help a page to be ranked more highly for its actual topic than it otherwise would. Surfers find the page in the search results and go to the page's site. There they find what they expected to find, having read the page's search engine listing. The surfer is happy, the search engine should be happy because it sent a surfer to a relevant site, and the page owner is happy because s/he has a site visitor.

The fact that so-called spam techniques were used to get the page high in the search results for its actual topic doesn't matter. Everyone's a winner.

Let me be perfectly clear. There is nothing instrinsically wrong, immoral or unethical with any of the so-called search engine spam techniques and methods. Like many other things in life, some of them can be used in unscrupulous ways but, in themselves, they are perfectly good, moral and ethical. Some of them are so good, moral and ethical that the search engines themselves use them when they auto-redirect visitors to a local version of the engine, and they do it by cloaking - providing different pages to different people according to some criteria; in this case it's the geographical location.

The reason that people use the techniques and methods is to help pages rank highly in the search engine results for their topics. Nobody suggests that there is anything wrong or unethical in trying to do that. Some search engines (including Google) even suggest ways to improve a page's rankings. So people are not against trying to improve rankings, but some of them are against some of the methods that are used to do it.

We have seen that everyone approves of taking steps to improve a page's rankings, so let's look at these search engine optimization techniques and methods that people some find questionable.

Before we do, I need to point out that, even though I will show that these search engine optimization techniques and methods are perfectly harmless, ethical and sensible, some engines don't want some of them to be used and, if they spot them being used, they may penalize the page or even the whole site. Pages and sites are not often penalized. It depends on the nature of the 'offense'. Generally speaking, search engines are down an anything that adversely affects their surfers.

I should also say that search engines are very poor at spotting unwanted techniques and rely on people reporting them. Whether or not you choose to use any of the techniques is up to you but, if you do, it would be wise to hide them from people and not talk openly about them unless you can talk anonymously.

What do you put in a progress report to an SEO customer? This article will look at what "not" to worry about too much and what to consider as indices of a good SEO program. It also gives an estimated time frame and a sketch of how to outline it to a customer (or to yourself if you are a DIY person).

Scoring your SEO efforts can help for a number of reasons. If you can "grade" yourself adequately when it comes to SEO efforts, you can charge on a performance basis. You can also know when to drop a project you are not succeeding in and honestly tell the customer to get someone else to work on the project.

Working as a solo SEO practitioner, or even as an SEO analyst in a large company, can be a confusing experience. Being so dependent on the SERPs makes search engine marketing seem vague and nebulous, and sometimes you feel like you are boxing with shadows. With web development or programming there are few external variables (except management and acts of God) and with SEO the search engines themselves are pretty much the external variable. Many things can throw off your scoring, so we will have a list of things to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to. First we will have what not to pay attention to.

SEO Target Marketing

There is a special style of SEO that is "goal oriented." I ran into a site that offers tips on metrics to watch. The metrics include tips on the user side and on the keyword research side.

Keyword Research

*

Identify the keywords your customers are actually using to find sites like yours - not just the ones you think they might use. *

Optimize your web site to achieve the business goals you want to achieve. *

Monitor the best keywords for your web site, which change over time. *

Monitor your site's performance to ensure you aren't missing out on any business. *

Monday, February 4, 2008

Our technical staff begins by checking the current status of your website to ensure that the optimization process will not be encumbered by any unforeseen problems. One of our staff optimizers will then use manual searches and custom research software to gather data and create a list of the most trafficked and targeted keywords in your industry. Your optimizer will consult with you to choose the best keywords for your optimization.

Content Creation

After a list of keywords has been finalized for your website, it is passed along to our content writers. Using their training and experience, our writers will create original, unique content or revise your current site copy. Keywords will be placed in accordance with proper SEO densities while maintaining a professional copy style that is appropriate for site marketing and human readers, not just search engine “spiders.” Our writers will contact you before getting started on your content to ensure that the essence of your website is not compromised.

Website Redevelopment

Our optimization engineers will redevelop your website to seamlessly integrate the optimized content and effectively communicate your keywords to search engines. All aspects of the website – including its architecture, meta tags, alt tags, graphic text, internal link structure and subpages – will be modified to be spider friendly and to ethically meet the keyword relevancy requirements of the search engines’ algorithms. The staff of Submit Express is dedicated to maintaining the design integrity and essence of your website.

Link Development

The development of incoming links from well-established websites is one of the major variables in attaining high search engine rankings. Link development is absolutely essential to your website’s success and is a major part of the optimization service that we offer. A high quantity of quality links can be developed through a variety of means, including:

After the optimization process is complete, we will submit your website to all the major search engines and directories, including Yahoo, AltaVista, HotBot, AlltheWeb, Google, AOL, iWon, Netscape, MSN, Lycos, Teoma, Ask and DMOZ (Open Directory). In addition to these submissions, we add fee-based directories such as Yahoo Directory, LookSmart and several other quality directories which will add to your link popularity. Lastly, if your website has indexing issues, we will create and submit site maps to both Google and Yahoo via their respective programs.

Reporting

Before we start the optimization process, we will run a ranking report to determine where your website ranks with the various search engines. We will also send you the report so you can see the results. Once optimization is complete, we will run monthly reports to check on your website's progress. You will be updated with these monthly ranking report results via e-mail. In addition to the monthly ranking reports, our staff will run weekly search engine monitoring to verify that your site has not been dropped by any of the major search engines. To ensure your satisfaction, our technicians will periodically call you or email you just to check in. We also invite you to call our staff anytime with questions.